During the past years, the interest in access technologies for providing services for voice, video and data has increased. A user has the option to connect his or her user equipment to one of a plurality of access networks, all available at a certain physical location. In this regard, it is noted that the user might use an Internet Service Provider (ISP) and one or more of the available access networks are independent of the ISP. Also, the communication of the user equipment may be entirely IP based, e.g., VoIP. The task of selecting the appropriate access network (i.e., an access network that is able to meet required characteristics) becomes more complex as the user equipment has to take into account various parameters, for example, a speed of the network, jitter, packet loss, and other factors. Thus, the communication networks are evolving toward multi-access architecture and terminals will likely soon find themselves in environments where they may be able to access any one of a number of different access networks.
Efficient access network selection is an important task for guarantying different characteristics such as Quality of Service (QoS) or reduced costs to the users as well as managing efficiently the network resources. However, it is likely that the ISP is not the owner of all the available access networks. Therefore, there is the challenge of obtaining sustained QoS and cost information in order to correctly steer the selection.
FIG. 1 shows a multi-access network architecture 10. In this network architecture, the ISP 12 serves a user equipment (UE) 14. The user equipment 14 may be a wireless device or a wired device that includes multiple interfaces through which the user equipment may connect to the access network. One of ordinary skill in the art would appreciate that a wireless device may include any device that is configured to communicate wireless with a node, for example, a personal digital assistant, a mobile phone, a laptop, etc. The user equipment 14 has the choice, in this instance, to connect to one of the available access networks AN1 16, AN2 18, and AN3 20. Each access network AN1 to AN3 may use different Radio Access Technologies (RAT) like Long Term Evolution (LTE), Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN), Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WIMAX) or other technologies to connect to the user equipment 14. The user equipment 14 may have the choice to connect to any of AN1 to AN3 while being at a given physical position, as long as the user equipment is configured to support the access network technology.
In this context, the decision to which one of the existing access networks the user equipment is to be connected may be based on a certain parameter or a plurality of parameters. The decision may be made by the ISP 12, the user equipment 14 or some combination thereof. However, for this kind of solution, the access networks AN1, AN2, and AN3 have to send information related to their states (characteristics and capabilities of the network) to a selection entity (which may be located in the ISP 12, the user equipment 14, or outside of the ISP and user equipment) to make the decision. Based on the information received from the access networks, the selection entity in the ISP or user equipment may classify the available access networks and provide the user equipment with a ranking list of the available access networks.
However, this solution requires the access networks to share and/or disclose information about their specific capabilities with the core network operator (ISP) or other external entity. In a competitive market, operators of the access networks may be reluctant to share such information and thus, open access to these access networks is limited.
Other approaches suggest sending data flow characteristics desired by the user equipment to the access networks such that the access networks will evaluate if they are capable of handling the data flow. In this case, no undesired information is shared by the access network with the ISP or user equipment. However, these approaches only provide a binary response to the ISP or user equipment regarding their capabilities, i.e., “yes” or “no” type of answers. Thus, if several access networks respond positively to a request from the ISP, it is still difficult to distinguish them in the ISP and the selected access network may be suboptimal in terms of resources or QoS for a particular connection.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to provide devices, systems and methods for selecting an appropriate access network that avoids the afore-described problems and drawbacks.